When Gotham FC announced at the end of June that they had signed global superstar striker Sam Kerr as a free agent out of Chelsea FC Women — and two weeks later when they landed Irish international midfielder Denise O’Sullivan — many fans of the league responded with incredulity. How has Gotham, a team that over the past two-and-a-half years brought in national team stalwarts like Rose Lavelle, Emily Sonnett, Tierna Davidson, Ann-Katrin Berger, Jess Carter, Jaedyn Shaw, Guro Reiten and, for a time, Crystal Dunn, remained compliant with the NWSL’s strict salary cap?
As Gotham’s president of soccer operations Yael Averbuch West has shared in various interviews and press conferences, the club aims to take full advantage of the intricacies of the NWSL’s roster-building policies in putting its team together. Her comments over the years offer a unique look into the club’s roster-building process under her leadership, including how they choose which players to target, how they attract them, and how they manage the NWSL’s salary cap, which she calls a “competitive weapon.”
When Averbuch West met with the media in April following the club’s announcement of the signing of Guro Reiten, she described the very first step of the recruitment process, which is scouting.
“We have an excellent scouting team and they are scanning the world and watching full games of all the leagues in the world at all times, tracking player performance in relation to contract end date, and understanding and talking to agents on who’s available,” she said. “So we have kind of an ongoing process.”
The key feature of the scouting process that she mentioned is its flexibility. “Something we’ve prided ourselves on is we have processes in place, but we also need to be adaptable,” Averbuch West explained. “We need to be opportunistic. We need to understand who’s available, who we might not have been looking at before but now it makes sense because there’s an opportunity to get a top player who’s out of contract.”
As they scout, club keeps in mind gaps in the existing roster they’re looking to fill. “We were looking for left-footed, left-sided, attacking-minded players who are incredibly intelligent, technically sound, have played at the highest level of the game, and have winning experience,” she explained, and Reiten fit the bill perfectly.
The club looks for players who “are passionate about bringing others along with them.” According to Averbuch West, “players all the time at training are pulling each other aside and saying ‘Hey, how did you view that situation?’ or, ‘Why did you approach this this way?’ or, ‘Teach me this particular way that you finish.’” Players who are collaborative in this way are particularly attractive to Gotham.
Gotham also values versatility. Referring to this adaptability as “the beauty of what we’ve constructed,” Averbuch West mentioned that “we intentionally recruit very intelligent, high soccer IQ players who can be adaptable.”
Reiten’s case exemplifies this; she has been playing predominantly as a fullback despite having come onto Gotham as an attacker.
After identifying the players they’d like to target, Gotham’s front office’s next step is reaching out to and scheduling conversations with those players.
Speaking with podcast Expected Own Goals ahead of the 2025 NWSL Championship game, Averbuch West emphasized that her top priority in recruitment is seeking out players who want to get better. “If they’re not hungry, if they don’t want to receive feedback, it usually doesn’t work very well,” she said.
Global superstar Sam Kerr was no exception. “In our meetings with her and the coaches we were breaking down clips of areas she could still improve in her game and she wanted that,” Averbuch West shared in a July 2 press conference. “With Sam, I think it’s amazing because our coaches are able to point out that even though Sam is maybe the best goalscorer of all time in the women’s game, we could argue that, and she still has areas that she can improve just like everyone else.”
Averbuch West also expressed a “desire for players to really feel that the club’s success is the most important thing.” While she and the club value players’ individual ambitions, that can’t be the end-all-be-all. “It’s very important to us, when it doesn’t go right for a player individually, the way they react and the way they show up for the team,” she said on the November podcast.
Critically, the team wants competitive players. Averbuch West says her ideal roster has “two world-class players deep in every role” and her ideal player “[wants] that type of competition and [doesn’t] want to start just because there’s no one else.”
Averbuch West claimed that she looks out for those three key components — hunger to improve, commitment to the club’s success, and willingness to compete for minutes on the pitch — on initial recruiting calls. When the players are “asking questions, they want more information or they’re nodding, it’s usually a great fit,” she said.
Finally, speaking to the media following the club’s acquisition of Reiten, Averbuch West stressed that she has “placed a high value on players who know how to win… in terms of the off-the-field presence and even how that translates to maturity on the field in big game moments — that type of experience and winning pedigree. It’s really hard to calculate the importance of that, but it’s really, really important to us.” While maybe not as key as the three factors enumerated in the podcast interview, this philosophy reflects in a lot of the team’s more veteran signings like Kerr, O’Sullivan, and Reiten.
The identification and recruitment process never stops for Averbuch West. “I do like bringing in players in the middle of the season,” she disclosed. “Continuity is important, but also a roster is an emotional, living, breathing organism and injecting new players in the middle of something does have a unique power to it.”
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Averbuch West has a very clear vision for what kind of roster she wants to build at Gotham FC. What does she do to turn that vision into reality, especially when operating under a strict salary cap?
In a press conference following Kerr’s signing, Averbuch West emphasized that the club is ”relentless in finding ways given the rules — whether it’s the cap itself, the High Impact Player Rule, all of the league rules — to optimize and pack the most talent into a really well-balanced roster.”
ESPN recently reported that Gotham FC holds around $1.25 million in unused allocation money that can be used towards players’ salaries without counting against the salary cap, $350,000 of which came directly from trading defender Lilly Reale to Boston Legacy FC shortly before the Kerr signing was announced. In a recent episode about team spending, Expected Own Goals revealed that by their own calculations, Gotham had accrued over $3.1 million in allocation money over the years that allows them to spend money on player salaries beyond the $3.7 million salary cap (ESPN’s numbers suggest around $1.85 million of this has already been spent). Around $900,000 of the remaining allocation money can only be cashed in this year, as the mechanism is being phased out by the league; since the $350,000 obtained from the Reale deal came from Boston’s expansion team allocation fund, it can be used anytime before 2028. Allocation money is a key tool that Gotham has leveraged to be able to fatten the contracts of top-class players, particularly as the club is competing with teams abroad who are not beholden to a salary cap for the world’s best talent.
“Sam could play I think at probably any club in the world she wanted to and we don’t take that lightly,” Averbuch West said of Kerr. “So for us, it’s about making an offer that shows respect to the player and also getting creative about what we do.”
There’s a limit to how creative NWSL clubs can be, however. The league fined Angel City FC $200,000 and docked the team three points in the standings following a salary cap violation in 2024, which the club attributed to childcare payments for players who are parents. As a result of this incident, the NWSL announced that it would begin conducting annual investigations and audits of player spending across all clubs.
Ahead of the 2026 NWSL season, the league also rejected a proposed contract extension for Washington Spirit star Trinity Rodman on the basis that it violated the “spirit” of the league’s rules. The contract was heavily backloaded in anticipation of a new media rights deal starting in the 2028 season, which would theoretically increase the salary cap.
These incidents indicate that the league is attentive to clubs’ salary-related dealings, and would sanction Gotham if it was violating league rules.
Although money is undoubtedly a very important factor for players, it isn’t the only tool that Averbuch West is using to attract players to Gotham. “It’s about understanding from her what’s most important and are we actually the right place for her,” she explained following Kerr’s signing. “Always start with that conversation.”
“Every phase of a player’s career looks different in terms of the skills they need and how they need to evolve,” she continued. “So as she is in this particular phase and moment in her career, we are going to help her to evolve, help her with her physical longevity and a lot of aspects of things. Ultimately, it’s very important to us that our players feel like we are helping them to progress their individual careers and not just the accolades but their capabilities as athletes.”
Gotham’s strong roster itself is also no doubt attractive in its own right; players want to train with other top players, even if it means they’re taking a lower paycheck due to salary cap constraints.
As a former player herself, Averbuch West understands the importance of putting players first, and this philosophy bleeds through her approach as a general manager. “The reality is we have players from all over the world who want to come play at our club,” she claimed in April. “Our limiting factor right now is our salary cap, not our ability to attract players and recruit. But that’s a position that is earned through hard work, through doing right by the players who have been here, through developing players who have gone on to improve their status with their national teams, through having players who become Rookie of the Year. All of those things are part of what makes players want to play at our club.”
“And it is also a position that — while it’s been earned — needs to be continually earned every single day, every week, every year,” she continued. “It is very important to us.”
The recruitment process doesn’t end for Averbuch West once the contract is signed and the ink is dry. “Our best ability to recruit comes from what we do every day with the players who are already on our team,” she explained. “What they say about us, how they continue with us, how they depart — those things mean a lot to us. We’re not perfect, but we do our absolute best to support our players to have a great experience at our club.”
After a deal is agreed upon and a contract is signed, Averbuch West said, is “when the work really starts.”
“We need to prove to them that they made the right decision,” she emphasized. “And I don’t take that lightly at all. It’s a big job ahead.”
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